Sales of in-car GPS products step up a gear in Q2

location based services

The market for mobile global positioning systems (GPS) doubled in Europe, the latest quarterly figures show. Almost 2.5 million devices were shipped in the three months from April to June, according to figures from Canalys. The UK-based research firm said that the growth has exceeded even the boom levels seen in the fourth quarter of last year. Canalys’ figures cover all mobile devices that have integrated GPS receivers and provide turn-by-turn vehicle navigation; the category includes handhelds such as the Mio P550, wireless handhelds like the HP hw6915, and transferables or portable navigation devices such as the TomTom GO and Garmin nüvi ranges.Chris Jones, director and principal analyst with Canalys, opined on the reason behind the strong performance: “Q2 can be a quiet quarter for many consumer electronics product categories but the navigation market, particularly in Europe, benefits from lots of customers buying devices in time for their summer vacations,” he said. “The market continues to go from strength to strength and we are seeing a continuous stream of new products coming to market and more and more variety in form factors, features and price points.” The research also uncovered a further slippage in sales of handheld computers, as European commuters flocked instead to single-purpose devices. Demand for GPS navigation products has firmly shifted to transferables, with handhelds accounting for just 10pc of the devices shipped in Q2. The decline has been relatively rapid, as handhelds were almost half the market as recently as Q1 2005.Jones also suggested that mobile operators are missing a trick by not focusing more strongly on navigation. “Most of the mobile operators still aren’t awake to the huge potential of mobile navigation and it comes a long way down on their priority list, after higher-risk plays such as mobile TV. It shouldn’t. It is perhaps the purest form of location-based service and has huge potential, not just in terms of subscriber numbers and as a revenue stream in itself, but also as a way of changing customer perception of what a phone is for, thus building a foundation for the delivery of other information services through the handset,” he said.By Gordon Smith